The Reason I Fell — (1)
It was the dead of night.
My body rose from the bed on its own and reached for its clothes.
It put on the priestly garb, draped a robe over it, smoothed down the hair pressed flat from lying down, and then started walking.
As if it were second nature, it stepped out toward the street, where past midnight even the streetlamps had gone dark one by one. Footsteps echoed—tap, tap—down a stretch of road that flowed with nothing but silence, without a single soul in sight.
And I was simply watching it all, wordlessly. Following along behind a body that moved without my consent.
Niger used to walk the streets every night.
If you asked how I knew—
Once in a while, like today, on the rare nights he wasn't tired, I'd watch him for no particular reason.
To see whether he might do something dangerous. To see whether he might break his promise with me and go on a murdering spree. Or, failing that, whether I might learn some secret I didn't know about him.
On the nights those questions kept blooming in my mind, I'd quietly follow his footsteps.
My hostility toward Niger may have vanished, but the thought of what if always lingered in my head.
Then again, those thoughts of mine had always been pointless.
He gazed at the moon.
He felt the cool night wind on his skin.
He climbed to the rooftop of some deserted building and stared blankly at the sky.
He watched the clouds drift slowly by. He counted the stars shining under the dark sky. He turned his gaze and counted each of the buildings that came into view.
Nothing he did carried any meaning. No—or at least, none that I could see.
Moonlight washed the streets bright, and beneath it, Niger simply let the hours slip away.
He was hollow.
His emotions came and went, yet I could feel nothing from him.
Like an empty shell of a person.
He only looked up at the sky.
"Brother."
And then, once in a while, he would call for me.
Those words—that voice—struck me as inexplicably sorrowful, so I answered with silence. I thought he, too, would prefer the silence.
Though the emotions I felt from him carried no such tenderness in them.
That was just my own gut feeling.
I opened my eyes.
My mind was still hazy, and the scenery around me wavered and swam.
Having somehow survived(?) Friday's midterm exams, I had done nothing but sleep all weekend.
Strangely drained of strength, I'd tried casting recovery spells with my divinity, then purification spells, but nothing changed.
And no wonder—I'd been sleeping like the dead from sheer exhaustion every night, and then last night I'd gone and shared Niger's vision on top of it all.
I sat up.
But my vision still swayed.
By this point, even Niger—who should have been cracking some joke or other—was staying strangely quiet, for whatever reason.
Despite the odd feeling, I still had to go to work.
"Professor Niger, so anyway, you know how this weekend I was thinking—"
Hollow.
I had arrived at the Academy and was sitting at my desk in my office, but I could barely make out Elia's voice chattering away beside me.
My vision kept blurring in and out of focus.
While I drifted, Elia came right up to my face and said,
"Professor Niger, what do you think?"
"…Pardon? What did you say…?"
At a distance so close our lips might have touched, I jerked my head back.
My vision wobbled again at the movement, and Elia seized my cheeks in both hands.
"Professor Elia…?"
"Professor."
"…?"
"You're feeling ill right now, aren't you?"
"Excuse me…?"
A priest, sick? What kind of ridiculous joke was that?
A short laugh escaped me. I looked at her with what was, for me, a rather careless smile.
"When would a priest ever fall ill…? In this land watched over by Elohim, no priest could possibly be sick, so there's no need to worry on my account…"
The words trailed off.
I had wanted to deliver a complete answer, but something beyond my will stretched the ending out long and thin.
It felt almost like I was acting cute on purpose.
"Hmm…, I do quite like this side of you, Professor, I really do…. But no matter how I look at it, you're definitely sick right now."
"Haha, no, I'm not…. Just a little dazed, that's all. I suppose I pushed myself too hard during the midterms—I've been foggy all day…"
I smiled and insisted I was fine, then rose from my seat.
It was time for my lecture.
"Professor Niger, if you're feeling even the slightest bit off, you have to tell me, okay?"
"Yes, of course…, I'm truly grateful for your concern…"
I gave a small bow and left the office.
Time passed.
And so, I was earnestly lecturing away.
"…Now, if you look at this circuit, you may find it a little… more complex than the ones you learned from me."
The words came out of my mouth.
The eyes of the students watching me were filled with some vague worry.
Why were they all looking at me with such anxious expressions? I was perfectly fine, so why did every single gaze aimed my way look like that?
Shouldn't they be the ones worrying—about their own futures, about to be pulverized by my lectures?
After all, the spite the midterms had kindled in me was fully intended to be vented through my teaching.
"This circuit, in truth, has merely had a few strokes added…. It's really not a difficult one. Taking the basic framework of the circuit…"
Everything was a haze.
I had no idea what I was even saying anymore.
My voice grew quieter and quieter, and my eyes kept trying to close.
I could hear the students' voices. But those, too, buzzed and droned, never quite reaching me.
Time to put every last one of those bastards through the 500x lecture…
That was my last thought as my eyes fell shut.
THUD—
There was the sound of someone collapsing.
It was probably my body.
Then, leaving the rising murmur of the crowd behind me, I lost consciousness just like that.
Tap-tap-tap—
I tore down the corridor in a rush.
When I heard that Professor Niger had collapsed, my heart lurched.
I mean—
I'd told him, point blank, that he looked sick.
And in that dazed state, he had stubbornly carried on lecturing and passed out right in front of his students.
"Ugh, honestly…!"
I should have just stopped him from lecturing altogether, I berated myself.
It was my own fault—there was something so handsome about that dazed look of his, and cute on top of it, that I let my guard down.
There was no time to return the greetings of students passing by. I sprinted straight for the infirmary.
They said the professors had been carried there by the students.
"Hoo…"
And so I reached the infirmary.
BANG—
I flung the door open and marched straight in.
"Professor Niger—!"
"Professor Elia, please keep your voice down in the infirmary."
"Ah…, I'm so sorryyy…."
So yes, I'd charged in calling his name out of pure worry, and promptly got scolded for it.
I apologized with a nod and made my way deeper into the infirmary.
It was quiet.
So still that I could barely sense another person's presence. Only faint breaths drifted up from the beds here and there.
The patients I passed were almost all students.
The kind who frequented the infirmary—students injured during practical training, or ones who'd knocked themselves out in alchemy demonstration accidents.
I slipped past them.
And so, past everyone else, I arrived at the bed bearing Professor Niger's name, and threw back the firmly drawn curtain with a shhk.
And then I saw it.
"Huh?"
"Oh, Professor Claudius is here."
There sat Bellatrix, right beside Professor Niger's bed, reading a book as naturally as if she belonged there.
"…And why, might I ask, is Student Bellatrix here?"
Crunch—
I heard the sound of my own teeth grinding.
Though "heard" might not be quite right—it was a sound coming out of my own mouth.
And she must have heard it too, because she let out a soft laugh and said, all sly, "Well, he's my professor's student, and he collapsed in the middle of my lecture, so naturally it falls to me to keep vigil at his bedside. Wouldn't you agree?"
"…Ah. I see. Well, now that I've arrived, I think you may take your leave. Don't you have another lecture to attend?"
I gritted my teeth and forced out the politest words I could manage, but the whole gist of what I wanted to say was simple.
Leave that spot.
That spot is mine, so move.
And surely that message had gotten through to her loud and clear—yet Bellatrix merely shook her head with a deep, rich smile.
"What a shame. I'm free right now, thanks to the fact that your lecture hours haven't started yet, Professor."
"…Even so, wouldn't you say a student's duty is to study diligently even in her spare hours?"
I scraped together every excuse I could find to send her on her way.
Frowning, I even reached for a word as musty as "a student's duty"—something I wouldn't have touched with a ten-foot pole under normal circumstances.
Then again, nothing that flimsy was ever going to send her packing.
"And that's exactly why I'm reading a book right now, isn't it? Ah—actually, Professor, weren't you due at a lecture soon yourself?"
"Ngh…!"
God, seriously.
There was no beating her with words. None at all.
I really should have studied how to win an argument, I thought. If I'd known this was coming.
Ordinarily, I settled just about anything with the authority and wealth of my House—and failing that, with the sword, that most excellent of conversation tools.
But a Ducal Princess's authority and fortune were beyond my reach, and I could hardly draw a sword on a student, and I couldn't win a single exchange with words either—I felt like I was about to burst a blood vessel.
And then the Princess, as if driving home the final period on a debate well won, closed her book with a smile.
"So don't you worry, and go on your way. I'll be nursing him here, sweetly and kindly. In a manner such as this, say."
And she reached out her hand.
She gave the sleeping Professor Niger's face the gentlest little poke.
Tik—
I heard something snap.
A shout burst out of me before I could stop it.
"You—you—you fox of a woman!"
"Hm. In all my years alive, that's the first I've been called a fox. Well, if Professor Claudius says so, I suppose it must be true."
A mischievous smile.
No trace of any shift in emotion, not a flicker of agitation—just that, and nothing more.
"Grr…! You're doing this on purpose because you know I like Professor Niger, aren't you!"
"Hm, how would I know that? It's not as though you go around announcing it to the whole world."
"Ngh!!"
I was just about to let her have another piece of my mind at the sight of the Princess so placidly carrying on—
Tap-tap—
Someone tapped me on the shoulder from behind.
Lips pressed tight, I turned around. It was the doctor who'd asked me to keep quiet earlier.
"…Professor Elia, please exit the ward."
"Huh…?"
No.
No, no, no.
This was not how it was supposed to go.
"Not 'huh.' Please step outside of the patient's room. Disturbances in the ward are strictly prohibited."
"B-but…, I wasn't being loud on purpose, I swearr…"
I tried, lips trembling on the verge of tears at the sheer injustice of it, to plead my case to the doctor.
"It's for the patients' rest. Please exit."
"Waahhh…"
He refused flatly, and hauled me bodily out of the ward.
And then.
"Hm, Professor Claudius. Off to your lecture, are you? Such remarkable passion for teaching, I see. You always have my full support."
Before my eyes flickered the image of her, utterly at her leisure, giving Professor Niger's cheek a little poke.
Waaaahhh….